ie: I live in (a suburb of) Vancouver and had always used Seattle until a year or so ago. I've used servers in Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver and found them to be slow. San Jose was a good one for a long time, even though geographically it's farther away than the other west coast locations.

Most recently Sacremento has been very good for me, during sales/releases and in normal every day use.

When it comes to download speeds, all I can do is suggest getting a big download started, switching the locations (restart Steam after each change) and experiment with it.

In any case, it's definitely an issue. But, like I said, I can see why Valve chooses to ignore it.

I don't see them as ignoring the issue, they add servers fairly regularly. ie: Vancouver is a fairly recent addition, as the only Canadian option used to be Toronto.